The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, Volume 1: Texts

Book Overview

"The Greek magical papyri" is a collection of magical spells and formulas, hymns, and rituals from Greco-Roman Egypt, dating from the second century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. Containing a fresh translation of the Greek papyri, as well as Coptic and Demotic texts, this new translation has been brought up to date and is now the most comprehensive collection of this literature, and the first ever in English.

The Greek Magical Papyri in...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226044475
• ISBN13: 9780226044477
• Release Date: January 1996
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.2" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

A truly amazing journey

This book isn't for the casual reader, it is both hard to read as well as understand, if you are looking for a book on witchcraft there are much easier reads and the spells and rituals in this tome are not really going to be possible to recreate without serving time. As a look into the everyday lives of our ancestors and how they saw magick as an everyday event it is amazing, worth the hard read to see just what the modern world has lost in it's rush to dismiss what we have difficulty in explaining or are to afraid to ask.

Important for the Arts of Evocation

Much has already been said about this phenomenal collection of texts and I would be redundant to merely repeat much of what I find intriguing. However with that said, I have been delving into this phenomenal text since a fellow Evocational Magics practitioner turned me onto it. There's quite a bit of useful information for those who are practitioners of the arts of Summoning Spirits via Evocation. If you desire to use this collection of texts in this manner, then you will need to make a thorough study of the various texts in this collection. There are specific passages that work very well as incantations for summoning the 72 Spirits listed in the Goetia, the first book of the Lemegeton. Further the rite of the Headless One is included in this text without modification and that too is an excellent addition to the arsenal of the working karcist. Overall you will find a lot of useful lore and knowledge in this manual. Get it. Study it. Put it into use.

Essential Source Material

This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in Greek magick, or the development of the Western Esoteric Tradition. It is full of literally hundreds of fragments and whole spells from ancient Greece, covering a huge range of areas from divination to love spells to knowledge gathering to revenge to exorcism. The Greek gods, along with other imports, are to be found throughout the texts, as well as a lot of planetary material, such as extensive use of the Greek vowels. You have to read this book if you are serious about magick, there is no excuse not to!

Ian Myles Slater on: Magic and Syncretic Religion

According to the introduction to this volume, among other competent sources, one of the more interesting shocks to the delicate sensibilities of nineteenth-century classical scholars was delivered by papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt. The serene and rational "classical" Greeks of their (mainly German) imaginations turned out to be human beings with messy fears, desires, hatreds, and jealousies, and a willingness to turn to magic (ugh!) to obtain their ends. There they were, in Greek, actual "magical papyri" -- spell books, that is, not so much documents purporting to be potent agents in themselves, in the old Egyptian manner of ritually empowered images and paintings. A common reaction: Let's keep it a secret! It didn't work. A younger generation of scholars (also mainly, but not entirely, German) began mining the texts for information on daily life (astrological papyri proved more helpful) and religion (more successfully) in late antiquity. Texts scattered in museums and published, if at all, in a variety of journals, had to be assembled and properly edited. Some early efforts were exemplary, some problematic (and some both). It sometimes seemed as if a curse had been laid on the enterprise. Early deaths, the First World War, and economic chaos delayed the publication of a carefully edited volume of collected papyri (Greek passages only). The second volume survived World War II only in proof copies. Meanwhile, more papyri turned up, and the project had to be re-done. One of the more fortunate results of this delay is the present volume, a careful translation of the Greek papyri containing magic spells, along with the Demotic (late Egyptian in a native "shorthand") and Coptic (late Egyptian in a mostly Greek-derived script) passages in the same manuscripts. A team of scholars worked on the translations, which come with concise introductions and notes. It is based on the arrangement in the earlier text editions (although, frustratingly, it does not come with page-references to the first edition, used in over half a century of scholarly literature). A second volume, including fuller references, and, above all, indexes, was announced, but so far does not seem to have appeared. This is frustrating, given the number of topics, names, and materials mentioned in just the larger manuscript collections. As for the work at hand, it is fascinating, if inherently frustrating. We have parts of a library of someone who may have been a working magician, with the habits of a scholar, and actual charms and amulets for a less discriminating clientele. There are instructions on how to pull off party tricks, win (or torment) a lover, or influence important people, as well as protect yourself from the spells of others. Greek gods mingle with Egyptian deities older than the Pyramids, and Mesopotamian (even Sumerian) Powers make brief appearances. Garbled bits of Jewish and Christian lore are sprinkled throughout. The extent to which any of this represents a rea

Magic as it was (and is)...

Of all of the works on Magic in the ancient and modern worlds I have read, this volume ranks among the highest. Readers who are interested in or who practice magic in any way, shape, or form should find this a refreshing break from so-called "New age" and "Neo-pagan" romanticisms. A fantastic sourcebook for the scholar and the practioner (espescially in a market dominated by Celtic and Middle Ages influences), this work presents scores of translated texts with minimal (yet precise) commentary and a fine glossary of the more obscure terms. This book represents a rare glimpse into the magical lives of real people in the Ancient world- which in the end , reveals how distorted, predjudiced and misinformed much of the present day attitudes regarding the subject of Magic and belief systems in the Ancient World can be.